The development of high power fibre chirped pulse amplification systems

With its broad gain bandwidth and high optical conversion efficiency, ytterbium (Yb)-doped silica fiber represents an attractive medium for the generation and amplification of ultrashort optical pulses. Research interest in Yb-doped fiber chirped pulse amplifier (CPA) systems first appeared in the late 1990s. However, the potential advantages and capabilities of Yb-doped fiber CPA systems were not fully studied during the early research. Further scaling of both the average power and the pulse energy have now become possible with the development of several key technologies that are associated with Yb-doped fiber CPA systems. Finally, the development of a novel fiber CPA system operating with strong selfphase-modulation (SPM) is described, which applied adaptive shaping of the spectral phase of the input pulses. The pre-compensation of both SPM induced phase distortion at high energies, and residual dispersion from mismatched stretcher/compressor technologies at low energies are investigated